Conduct

Conducts are various limitations players may set to themselves in order to make the game more challenging. The game keeps track of your conducts and shows them at the end of the game. You may also see them any time by using the extended command#conduct. Note that conducts only apply to actions in game; a priest obviously believes in a god but does not automatically lose atheist conduct, and classes that begin the game with learned spells do not automatically lose illiterate conduct.

Contents

Voluntary challenges:
You have gone without food.
You have been an atheist.
You have never hit with a wielded weapon.
You have been a pacifist.
You have been illiterate.
You have never genocided any monsters.
You have never polymorphed an object.
You have never changed form.
You have used no wishes.

the corpse of any monster (or a tin of its 'meat') represented by b, j, or F.

tins of spinach.

There are other monsters which are classified as vegan food, but which don't leave corpses: all v and y, elementals, all ' except flesh and leather golems (which are obviously also not vegetarian), and ghosts. You can eat such monsters when polymorphed into something with a digest attack. The same goes for monsters that leave vegetarian corpses.

All of the food restriction conducts make it much harder to gain intrinsics, as the main source of intrinsics is eating corpses. When paired with other conducts such as polyselfless and/or atheist, it can make gaining some intrinsics impossible.

The worst problem for a late-game atheist character is likely to be the lack of divine protection. Holy water and an artifact weapon can be wished for or obtained in other ways, and Luck can be maximised by throwing valuable gems to a coaligned unicorn in lieu of sacrificing.

This is mostly self-explanatory. Throwing weapons, firing missiles and using wands is allowed. Hitting with other objects than weapons does not break this conduct. Thus you may very well use a cockatrice corpse as a weapon should you acquire one. Pick-axes, unicorn horns, and grappling hooks, however, do count as weapons, even though they are shown in the tool-category. Applying a bullwhip only breaks conduct if the target is not wielding a weapon. When trying to maintain a weaponless conduct, one should be very careful when wielding a pick-axe for digging.

Being illiterate means that you do not read or write anything. This includes scrolls, spellbooks and even fortune cookie messages and t-shirts. Scrolls of mail (e.g. from users viewing your game on NAO) also break the conduct, so it is advisable to turn off this option when attempting to be illiterate. Using a magic marker is also banned. Reading random engravings you may encounter does not break this conduct. Engraving anything but an x, such as Elbereth, also breaks this conduct.

"Polyless" conduct means never causing an object to be polymorphed via spell, wand, or potion of polymorph. Polymorphing monsters does not break this conduct. However, if a monster drops carried objects as a result of polymorphing, they will also get polymorphed[citation needed].

This conduct is comparatively easy: 42.3% of all winning accounts on NAO have a polpiles-less ascension.

Two wishing-related conducts are tracked: wishing for anything and wishing for artifacts. If you wish for, say, a silver dragon scale mail, you still have the artifact-wishless conduct. However, if you wish for any artifact, you lose both conducts, regardless if the wish was granted.